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Transcript
CRASH COURSE
in
Lead Nurturing
The Basics of Using Multi-Channel
Nurturing to Turn Anonymous and
Known Leads Into Customers
Email
Telephone
1 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
Display and Social Advertising
Table of Contents
What Is Lead Nuturing?
Lead Nurturing’s Transformation, or
Why is Lead Nurturing Like a ThreeMartini Lunch?
03
05
The Car Buying Process, and How It
Illustrates the Transformation of the
Buyer’s Journey
08
Expanding Lead Nurturing Beyond
the Email Inbox
09
Interview: Shantel Shave, DirectorDemand Generation, HootSuite
11
What’s Your Favorite Metaphor for
Lead Nurturing?
13
Case Study: Workfront
14
Why Lead Nurturing Should be Part
of an Always-on Marketing Program
28
Building Blocks of a Nurturing
Program
30
1.Strategy
31
2. Defining Personas
32
3. Segmenting Your Audience
33
4. Creating Content for Your
Segments at Every Stage of the
Buying Process
34
5. Measure, Test, Optimize
35
6. Maintain a Clean, Updated
Database
36
7. Move Your Lead Nurturing
Beyond Email
37
Case Study: Cetera Financial Group
38
Interview: Justin Gray, CEO,
LeadMD
17
What the 2-Stage Funnel Says About
the State of Lead Nurturing
19
42
Interview: Andrew Hiickey, Director
of Digital Marketing, eCornell
Interview: John McTigue, Executive
VP, Kuno Creative
21
Case Study: Groupon UK
44
23
A Great Leap Forward in Lead
Nurturing
Interview: Ardath Albee, CEO,
Marketing Interactions
Conclusion
46
26
27 Lead Nurturing Experts to Follow
on Social Media
47
1
WHAT
is
Lead nurturing?
3 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
What is Lead Nurturing?
Lead nurturing has been around a long time, as long as there have been
leads. The concept of lead nurturing is simple: It’s the process of building
relationships with prospects who aren’t yet ready to buy your product
or service.
REACH
NURTURE
AQUIRE
4 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
Increase awareness
Build brand
Shape perception
Improve lead quality
Increase conversion
Drive pipeline and revenue
The ultimate goal of reaching and then nurturing prospects is
to “acquire” them, to drive them toward becoming a customer.
2
Lead Nurture’'s
Transformation
Or
Why is Lead Nurturing
Like a Three-Martini Lunch?
5 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
Lead Nurture’s Transformation, Or Why is
Lead Nurturing Like a Three-Martini Lunch?
Lead nurturing has evolved over the years, and recently, it has changed
rather dramatically.
Before the rise of the Internet, the
sales team controlled lead nurturing.
Salespeople built relationships with
the leads generated by marketing, by
networking, or by their own cold calling.
Salespeople built relationships with
prospects—that is they nurtured leads,
because not everybody is ready to
buy right now—by demonstrating their
industry knowledge, by showing their
humorous or entertaining side, and,
ultimately by explaining why a prospect
should buy the salesperson’s product or
service. Often, the salespeople did their
lead nurturing over lunch—occasionally
over the mythical, Don Draper-style
three-martini lunch.
“The sales guy’s job was to stay in touch
with prospects over time—reach out by
phone, maybe have a live meeting,” said
John McTigue of Kuno Creative. “As
email developed, the salesperson would
reach out by email, and so it had always
been a one-to-one thing. But over the
past five to seven years, marketing
automation has come into the field—
and it’s now possible to automatically
nurture the same kind of leads.”
6 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
The bottom line is the buyer’s journey
has changed. In the past, prospects
moving along the path to purchase had
to identify themselves when reaching
out for information that might inform
a purchase. They had to provide
an address for a brochure or other
collateral to be mailed to them. Once
prospects identified themselves, the
sales team went into action to build
relationships with prospects, nurture
them, and, ideally, close deals.
Now, however, the Internet enables
prospects to self-educate by gathering
information on products and services
anonymously. Prospects conduct
research by visiting corporate websites,
perusing review sites, and consulting
with peers via social media—all while
remaining anonymous or without
handing over an email address.
Forrester Research found that as much
as 90 percent of the buyer’s journey may
be complete before prospects reach out
to a salesperson.
What this means is that for the first
90 percent of the buyer’s journey,
marketing is responsible for keeping
relevant messages in front of prospects.
And a large part of this task includes
lead nurturing.
90%
of the buyer’s journey
may be complete before
prospects reach out
to a salesperson.
For the first 90 percent
of the buyer’s journey,
marketing is responsible
for keeping relevant
messages in front
of prospects.
7 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
The Car Buying Process and How It
Illustrates The Transformation of the
Buyer’s Journey
Twenty years ago, buying a car was a daunting process for most of us.
It was filled with dread for the buyer,
primarily because the car dealer had
all the information. For example, he
knew the dealer invoice price, and he
knew how the car was performing in
the market. It was asymmetrical with the
advantage decidedly going to the car
dealer. The buyer knew the sticker price,
and that was about it.
A very similar thing has happened in
the B2B buyer’s journey. Buyers can
research their purchase online, selfeducating on the market until they’re
almost ready to buy. It’s only when they
believe they have virtually complete
information that buyers reach out to a
vendor and talk with a salesperson.
Today, a buyer has access to almost
complete information. She can research
the car online on the Kelley’s Blue Book
site, KBB.com. She can consult with
other car buyers via social media, and
she can walk in the front door of the
dealer knowing what a fair price is for
the car she wants. Now, the car buying
process is more of a fair fight.
8 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
3
Expanding
Lead Nurturing
Beyond the email inbox
9 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
Expanding Lead Nurturing
Beyond the Email Inbox
Marketers typically have conducted lead nurturing via
automated email programs aimed at carefully segmented
groups of known prospects—that is, prospects who have
shared their email addresses. For many marketers, in fact,
lead nurturing has become synonymous with automated
email marketing programs.
But email nurturing has its limitations.
First, only 5 percent of a company’s
website visitors typically share their
email address. Second, even if a
company is able to secure a prospect’s
email, only 20 percent open emails. The
funnel is leaking prospects all over the
place, and 99 percent of people who
have expressed interest in your company
aren’t regularly receiving your messages.
These drawbacks are why more
marketers are embracing multi-channel
nurturing, expanding lead nurturing
beyond the email channel. They are
also nurturing leads via telephone and
events, to name just two channels.
Additionally, thanks to advances in
marketing and advertising technology,
marketers can nurture anonymous
prospects, who haven’t yet shared
their email address. With these new
tools, marketers can nurture anonymous
prospects with automated display
and social advertising, sequencing
messages for these prospects based
on their business demographics
and on their online behavior (or digital
body language).
10 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
5%
of a company’s website
visitors typically share their
email address.
20%
open emails.
99%
of people who have
expressed interest in your
company aren’t regularly
receiving your messages.
INTERVIEW: SHANTEL SHAVE
Director-Demand Generation, HootSuite
Q: What is your lead
nurturing philosophy?
Shantel Shave: We have targeted
campaigns that launch when somebody
enters our system. What we try to do
when we structure a nurture program
is to put something in place that
immediately identifies those salesready opportunities. It’s a very targeted
push to see if we can get a prospect
engaged with a sales person at the
outset, and then failing that, we do
some deep segmentation—based on
region, language, industry, org size,
business challenge. Then we map that to
where we think they are in the customer
journey. We do that by looking at what
their engagement scores are, and we
know what they may or may not have
chosen to interact with before. Then we
serve them the appropriate content. The
way that our model is changing right
now is that we’re moving from thinking
of nurture as just something that’s
driven by email to something that is very
multichannel. So, we’re making sure that
all of our channels are aligned and that
all of those interactions or touch points
that our users have with the brand are
telling the same story, depending on
where they are in that nurture cycle.
Q: What’s your
favorite metaphor
for lead nurturing?
Shave: We definitely approach it from
a relationship standpoint. We try to
build a long-term relationship with
the prospect. It’s not going to be an
immediate decision when you’re selling
enterprise software. You need to really
position yourself as a thought leader and
a trusted partner along the journey to
create that relationship, so that they feel
confident moving forward.
“Lead Accelerator has allowed
us to map our content so that
it aligns with the customer
journey and move people along
that path in a very logical way.
For us, the conversion rates
that we’ve seen from what
we were using previously–
they’re dramatically different,
dramatically improved.”
—Shantel Shave
11 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
INTERVIEW: SHANTEL SHAVE
Q: How has lead nurturing
changed over the past
few years?
Shave: We take a much more personal
approach. We have the tools now to
understand what somebody needs
at an individual level. So rather than
speaking very broadly across these
large groups, we try to serve what that
particular person is looking for. We’ve
recently integrated several tools to
help us understand that. For example,
for our lead scoring model, we have
our accounts integrated with Google
Analytics, so we can see what prospects
are doing on the site. We’re looking at
a number of data points, and all of that
is feeding where we ultimately end up
choosing to place this person in our
nurture cycles.
Q: Do your metrics show
that lead nurturing is
working?
also have a larger deal size. I think it’s
because oftentimes during that process,
we’ve been able to introduce prospects
to the overall solution rather than just
one portion of it—so people come in with
a better understanding of all of the ways
that Hootsuite can help them address
their business problems.
Q: How critical is data in
lead nurturing?
Shave: Data is everything, and you need
to understand who you’re speaking to
in order to have a conversation that’s
relevant to them. Building that data
quality and data hygiene into your
models at the outset is going to give you
so much better results later on. That’s
an area that often gets forgotten. So,
building it into your process every step
of the way means you’re going to have
much more successful programs.
Shave: Our sales cycle is shorter for a
lead in multi-channel nurture, and we
12 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
“Data is everything, and
you need to understand
who you’re speaking
to in order to have a
conversation that’s
relevant to them.
—Shantel Shave
What’s Your Favorite
Metaphor for Lead Nurturing?
Companies that sell marketing automation and other tools
that help marketers with their lead nurturing efforts embrace
metaphors to help illuminate exactly what lead nurturing is.
Here are the three most popular analogies:
Seedling
This metaphor, which compares a
prospect to a seedling, equates the
process of lead nurturing to the skills
needed to grow plants. Nurturing, in this
metaphor, is the watering, sunlight, and
perhaps even the talking to a seedling.
Nurturing provides everything required
to make it grow into a thriving plant—
ideally, one that will deliver the sweet
fruit of recurring revenue quarter after
quarter, year after year.
Romantic Relationship
In this metaphor, lead nurturing
is compared to a courtship, with
the marketer as the wooer and the
prospect as the wooed. This metaphor
emphasizes using the appropriate
message at the appropriate time. For
instance, just as a gentleman caller
wouldn’t ask a woman to marry him on
the first date, neither would a marketer
as for the sale the minute a prospect
expresses any interest at all in the
marketer’s product or service. Patience,
marketers, patience.
13 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
Conversation
This analogy stresses the back and
forth between the prospect and the
marketer. In this metaphor, as a prospect
exposes her digital body language as
she, for instance, visits different parts
of a website, the marketer keeps the
conversation going by directing the
prospect to various pieces of content
that appear to interest her. This analogy
of the lead nurturing process places a
premium on the marketer’s ability to not
simply talk about a prospect—but to shut
up and listen every once in a while.
CASE STUDY: WORKFRONT
WORKFRONT NURTURES
ANONYMOUS WEBSITE VISITORS
AND GENERATES LEADS WITH
LINKEDIN LEAD ACCELERATOR
Workfront is a cloud-based Enterprise Work Management solution
designed to help enterprise teams—from IT to Marketing, to company
leadership—eliminate the typical chaos of work and gain greater visibility
company wide. Workfront covers the entire lifecycle of work, from
request to report, in one easily adoptable platform.
On average, more than 96 percent of the visitors to Workfront’s
website leave without converting—a challenge shared by most B2B
marketers with savvy products and long sales cycles. Micah Beals,
the former Director of Digital Marketing at Workfront, saw this as a
huge opportunity. “In B2B you can’t expect most of your anonymous
visitors to convert on their first visit to the website,” he explained. “To
combat this we’ve tested website retargeting with various vendors in
the past, but they’ve always missed our cost per lead targets.”
14 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
96%
of visitors leave
without converting
CASE STUDY: WORKFRONT
Segmenting and Nurturing
Anonymous Website Visitors
Workfront nurtures
anonymous website visitors
and generates leads with
LinkedIn Lead Accelerator
Workfront needed a solution that was
catered to the B2B salescycle—one that
would speak to the unique needs and
interests of its website visitors. Using
LinkedIn Lead Accelerator, Workfront
nurtured prospects with waves of
LinkedIn Sponsored Updates, Facebook
Newsfeed, and display ads.
Objectives
Convert more of its anonymous
website visitors into leads
“Multi-channel nurturing makes
sense—the sequencing and
personalization of ads aligns
well with the B2B sales cycle.”
—Micah Beals
Former Director of Digital Marketing
Workfront
15 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
Target Audience
IT professionals
Marketers
Other enterprise decision
makers
Results
Generated over 640 leads injust
three months at a cost well
below target
CASE STUDY: WORKFRONT
Using website navigation, anonymous
visitors’ business demographic data and
more, Workfront developed a variety of
nurture streams that were customized
for different audience segments. For
example, after visiting (then leaving) the
solutions page on Workfront’s website,
IT professionals would see sequenced
waves of ads over a several week period
that were very specific to IT and related
to its solutions, while other (non-IT)
visitors would see different sets of ad
creative and calls to action.
Workfront’s multi-channel nurturing
strategy also included nurture streams
that were specific to marketers and
other types of professionals who
visited the home page, solutions page,
pricing page, and more. Based on this
criteria, each nurture stream offered
a unique sequence of content and
calls to action delivered via display
and social advertising.
Results and Measurement
Workfront used LinkedIn’s Full Funnel
Analytics to measure the performance
and impact that Lead Accelerator had
on its lead generation goals. It tracked
key metrics such as impressions, clicks,
conversions, and more, and could
drill down to see performance at the
creative level and optimize accordingly.
In just three months, Workfront
generated more than 640 leads via Lead
Accelerator at a cost well below their
cost per lead targets. “Conceptually,
multi-channel nurturing makes sense—
the sequencing and personalization of
ads aligns well with the B2B sales cycle,”
Beals explained. “We’re happy to see
that the hypothesis has been confirmed
by the great results it has driven.”
In just three months,
Workfront generated
more than
640
Leads
via Lead Accelerator
at a cost well below their
cost per lead targets.
1
2
3
16 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
INTERVIEW: JUSTIN GRAY
CEO, LeadMD
Q: How are changes in the
buyer’s journey impacting
the role of lead nurturing?
Justin Gray: We know 70 percent of
the buying process takes place online.
So, ultimately information is really
what has made lead nurturing become
paramount. People expect—via your
website, via your social profile, via
anything that represents that business
—to be able to get into those channels
and find out what you’re about, what
problems you solve, how you could
help them. They don’t expect to call a
representative or have a face-to-face
conversation in order for that to happen.
Q: During the part of the
buying process that takes
place online, what should
marketers be striving to
do with their lead
nurturing programs?
Gray: Lead nurturing for me is the way
that the buyer builds trust. If someone
really dislikes you, if you come into their
office, they’re not going to like you any
better if you just keep showing up.
Same thing with sending someone email.
You have to start by building that trust,
define how you could help someone,
build up that rapport and then keep
that rapport. The other element that
this evolution in technology has taught
us is that people are more fickle than
ever. It’s great that you can consume
messaging online, but if you’re not
keeping someone’s attention, they’ve
got a million other stimuli that they can
focus their gaze on. It really is that whathave-you-done-for-me-lately mentality,
where you need to be putting out great
content all the time.
17 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
“Lead nurturing for me is the
way that the buyer builds trust.
If someone really dislikes you,
if you come into their office,
they’re not going to like you
any better if you just keep
showing up.”
—Justin Gray
INTERVIEW: JUSTIN GRAY
Q: What are the first steps
you take in helping your
clients start a lead
nurturing program?
Gray: Our first question is always, Who
is your buyer? The next question will
be, Have you ever built buyer personas?
Have you ever built buyer journeys
based on these personas? The answer’s
always, Yes. The real answer is always,
No. A buyer persona is not, “Yes, we sold
to the CEO and the VP of IT.” It is literally,
“Who is this person, how do they build
trust, how do they form relationships,
what’s important to them?”
Q: What metaphor best
explains lead nurturing?
Q: How critical for a lead
nurturing program’s
ultimate success to get
sales and marketing on
the same page?
Gray: That’s absolutely key. If I’m asked,
if you had to give marketers one piece
of advice they can do today, I say spend
the day with sales. No one has a better
exposure to what the customer needs
than your sales team. They hear those
objections every single day, and if they
know that you’re taking those objections
and actually creating content around it,
that’s a huge alignment exercise
right there.
Gray: I think of lead nurturing as a
conversation. At a party, when you first
meet someone, you’re going to have
a completely different conversation.
Later on that evening or maybe the
next time that you see them, when
you’ve built that rapport, you’ll have
a different conversation.
18 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
“No one has a better
exposure to what the
customer needs than your
sales team.”
—Justin Gray
4
WHAT
the
2-stage funnel
says about the State
of Lead Nurturing
19 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
What the 2-Stage Funnel Says
About the State of Lead Nurturing
In the past, marketers usually divided their funnel into three stages. In the upper funnel, they
reached their target audience with branding and awareness messages. In the mid funnel,
marketers strived to engage prospects with content. And in the lower funnel, they nurtured
known prospects with content, such as product demos or price sheets, designed to move
them toward a sale.
REACH
NURTURE
Now, however, marketers can begin
nurturing prospects as soon as they
express an interest—and even if they
remain anonymous. That’s why a twostage funnel reflects the reality of the
marketing world today. There’s an
upper funnel, where marketers still
look to deliver branding and awareness
messages to a target audience at scale.
And there’s a lower funnel, where
marketers nurture anonymous prospects
and known prospects with a variety of
communications tools, ranging from
display and social advertising to
email programs.
20 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
Because technology enables marketers
to know a lot about even anonymous
website visitors—marketers can learn a
lot from the business demographics and
online behavior of their website visitors—
the entire lower funnel is now about
lead nurturing.
INTERVIEW: ANDREW HICKEY
Director of Digital Marketing, eCornell
Q: What is your philosophy
of lead nurturing?
Andrew Hickey: We do lead nurturing
primarily in two ways. On the pre-sale
side of things, we are trying to start
weaving our story early on and nurture
folks with progressive messaging. We’re
putting together a sequential story
that makes sense for the point where
the leads are in their buying process or
researching process. And then the other
side is, we do fairly extensive e-mail
nurturing after we know who our leads
are and they’ve identified themselves.
We have fairly intricate and extensive
lead nurturing programs for every
certificate program that we offer. Our
philosophy is personalization, which I
think is a familiar theme in nurturing—
personalizing your messaging, as much
as possible. We try to tread the line
between being not overly familiar with
people and balance that with giving
them the right information.
Q: How do you strike that
balance between providing
the right information but not
becoming overly familiar?
Hickey: We try to represent our brand
and convey our proposition in a way
that’s not annoying. It’s a line we try to
tread with things like retargeting as well
as with e-mail nurturing. You want to nail
down a good frequency. You don’t want
to flood people’s inboxes. If I get several
e-mails from the same sales person,
that’s not an appealing scenario for me.
So, we want to remain consistent and
we want to remain relevant and top of
mind, but we don’t want to be annoying.
We don’t want folks opting out. We stay
brand safe and respect our leads and
our prospects and give them some really
good information at the right time.
21 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
“We want to remain consistent
and we want to remain relevant
and top of mind, but we don’t
want to be annoying. We don’t
want folks opting out.”
—Andrew Hickey
INTERVIEW: ANDREW HICKEY
Q: What’s the best
metaphor for explaining
lead nurturing?
Hickey: I think of nurturing as kind of a
conversation. As a marketer attempting
to have a conversation with an audience,
with people and ultimately individuals,
you think about the way that you would
have conversation with somebody. Say
we all are in a room at a party. There
are people that you might not be
familiar with, and you want to introduce
yourself to them. I’m not going to go
up to a group of people and just butt
into their conversation and start talking
about eCornell. I’m going to act like
a normal member of society, walk up
and introduce myself and participate in
a little bit of small talk. I’ll get a sense
of what they’re talking about and what
they’re interested in, and when I feel
like I have enough information about
them, I’ll jump into the conversation. If
you’re trying to nurture a conversation
along in marketing, you should talk
how you would act in real life and try
to apply some of those principles and
approaches to lead nurturing digitally.
Q: It’s generally agreed that
lead nurturing has become
more effective. Why do you
think that is?
Hickey: You know it’s kind of an obvious
one, but it’s just the ability to automate.
Automation—it’s just become a lot
easier to do now. It’s a lot easier to
segment your audiences, a lot easier to
personalize message and have those
types of individual conversations that are
meaningful to your prospects.
22 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
“As a marketer attempting
to have a conversation
with an audience, with
people and ultimately
individuals, you think
about the way that you
would have conversation
with somebody.”
—Andrew Hickey
CASE STUDY: GROUPON UK
HOW LEAD NURTURING IS
HELPING GROUPON BUILD
A BROADER B2B BUSINESS
Up and running within days thanks to LinkedIn’s LaunchPad program,
Groupon UK is using Linkedin Lead Accelerator to nurture small
business leads with tailored messaging—and reinforce its credentials
as an essential B2B marketing partner.
Once upon a time, Groupon’s main challenge as a business
was to attract enough consumers to secure the discounts
its business model depended on. Today, as an established
consumer brand, its marketing objectives have evolved.
Groupon knows that it can deliver the volume of consumers
it needs to secure deals. Its focus now is on broadening
its reach among small businesses and demonstrating its
credentials as a marketing partner for merchants of all sizes.
23 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
REACH
Groupon focused on
broadening its reach
among small businesses
NURTURE
AQUIRE
CASE STUDY: GROUPON UK
In the UK, LinkedIn Lead Accelerator is
now a key part of the Groupon strategy,
marrying reach across online platforms
with the precision targeting possible
through LinkedIn data. Through LinkedIn
Lead Accelerator, Groupon is delivering
tailored advertising and content to
reflect the concerns of merchants
in different sectors, nurturing leads
throughout the funnel, and maintaining
engagement with the 90% of Groupon’s
small business visitors who fail to
convert on their first visit to its site.
Marrying off-site reach with the
power of LinkedIn data
For Groupon, the game-changer with
LinkedIn Lead Accelerator was its power
to reach prospects wherever they
traveled online yet still tailor content and
nurture streams precisely using LinkedIn
data. “LinkedIn Lead Accelerator and
offsite display advertising make LinkedIn
a very attractive marketing platform
for us,” explains Stephan Heller, Head
of Merchant Marketing for Groupon
EMEA. “When marketing to SMBs, it’s
important to recognize that they don’t
see themselves as a homogenous group.
LinkedIn gives us access to data for
smart marketing that talks to different
categories, and does so at scale.”
Accelerating leads faster
through LaunchPad
The service and support available
through the LinkedIn Lead Accelerator
LaunchPad played a key role in bringing
Groupon’s program up to speed quickly.
“LaunchPad was really good,” says
Heller. “It helped us get up to speed
in a frictionless way, without bringing
in additional headcount. It meant that
we could start using these advanced
nurture streams really, really quickly. To
us that’s a big advantage over traditional
retargeting, where we would have had
to go through an agency and wouldn’t
have direct access.”
24 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
“Six weeks in and the results
are really promising, which
is why we are extending our
Lead Accelerator program. It’s
fully measurable, easy to get
to the numbers, and we can
see that the ROI is there. At
the moment, the program is
UK only, but we’d like to start
using it in France and Germany
as well.”
—Stephan Heller
Head of Merchant Marketing
Groupon EMEA
CASE STUDY: GROUPON UK
The Challenge
The Results
Why LinkedIn?
•
Reach potential merchant partners
wherever they travel online
•
Ability to combine LinkedIn data with
reach anywhere on the web
•
Deliver tailored messaging to reflect
the value of Groupon to different
SMB sectors
•
Insights to understand the
demographics of their site traffic to
begin the process of nurturing
Develop parallel nurture streams
for different stages of the
purchase funnel
•
LaunchPad onboarding program to
provide support with setup, strategy,
launch and optimization
•
No requirement for additional
internal resource to manage the lead
nurture program
•
The Solution
•
LinkedIn Lead Accelerator delivering
display ads to prospects anywhere
on the web and using LinkedIn data
for precision targeting
•
Separate nurture streams to reflect
different engagement levels
•
Shorter data capture forms with
single-click form filling
•
Integration with Eloqua and
Salesforce for smoother follow-up
• Within the first 2 months, LinkedIn
Lead Accelerator increased
Groupon’s leads by 23%
• Web visitors that were nurtured
with LinkedIn Lead Accelerator
viewed 10% more pages and visited
the Groupon website 18% more
frequently on average than users
who did not
• LaunchPad ensured that Groupon’s
LinkedIn Lead Accelerator program
was up and running within days.
Groupon’s team had direct access
and control over the program and
full visibility of results
23%
10%
18%
increase in leads
more pages viewed
visited the website
more frequently
25 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
INTERVIEW: ARDATH ALBEE
CEO, Marketing Interactions
Q: Do you have
a philosophy of
lead nurturing?
Ardath Albee: Absolutely, I do. I’m on a
mission to end the campaign, because
in my opinion lead nurturing is really
building the story from the beginning
to the end of the buying process—so
you need to cover the whole thing, and
you need to figure out exactly what
information people need at each stage.
You need to construct this ongoing story
building exercise across the buying
process. That’s what I believe a nurturing
campaign should do: Keep building that
engagement by sharing the knowledge
prospects need to take next steps.
Q: Has lead nurturing
moved beyond email
and reliance on a database
of prospects?
Albee: You need to think about nurturing
as not being reliant your database,
because in my opinion every time you
touch a prospect or your prospect
touches your content, you’re nurturing.
I don’t necessarily confine the idea
of nurturing to your contacts in your
database. The thing about campaigns
that you need realize that it’s a construct
that we as marketers created in order to
put a box around the marketing activity,
so we could measure it. But it’s not our
buyers’ construct. They’re not saying,
Please give me three touches, and then
you can have your sales person call me.
26 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
“You’re just wasting a whole bunch
of time and money and effort
if you’d don’t get on the same
page with your salespeople, you
absolutely have to have sales in
that conversation.”
—Ardath Albee
INTERVIEW: ARDATH ALBEE
Q: How important are
personas in developing a
nurturing program?
Albee: It’s critical. I won’t do a lead
nurturing program unless the company
has really great personas that are active
or they develop them with me. The
reason for that is how do you determine
the questions, what the person cares
about, what they’re responsible for
achieving: how do you know all that if
you don’t have personas? How do you
build the story that they care about if
you don’t know your audience? Things
that we think are interesting may not be
interesting to our buyers. We need to be
able to step into their mindsets to figure
out how are we going to build really
compelling content.
Q: How important is getting
agreement between sales
and marketing in the lead
nurturing process?
Albee: It’s huge. I involve sales in the
persona development process right from
the start. The reason for that is because
if we create personas with marketers in
a vacuum, we’re just wasting a whole
bunch of time and money and effort. To
get on the same page with your sales
people, you absolutely have to have
sales in that conversation. You also
need to talk to them about what kinds
of questions they get asked all the time,
so that you can create content that the
sales team will actually use. There’s this
statistic out there that 70 percent of
marketing content goes unused. You
have to create stuff that your sales
people are going to use.
27 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
“Personas, are critical. I
won’t do a lead nurturing
program unless the
company has really great
personas. We need to
be able to step into the
mindsets of prospects
to figure out how we’re
going to build compelling
content. I don’t know
how you create a content
strategy without them.”
—Ardath Albee
5
WHy
Lead Nurturing
Should Be part of
an always-on
marketing program
28 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
Why Lead Nurturing Should Be Part
of an Always-On Marketing Program
The campaign is dead. Prospects aren’t waiting for you to
speak or develop new messaging. They’re actively reaching
out—anonymously—to self-educate on your products and
services (as well as your competitors’).
This new reality requires an always-on
marketing mindset. You’d never consider
turning off your website. That would be
lunacy. Your website is always on.
nurturing program that expands beyond
the email inbox and includes display and
social advertising.
It’s the same for your search marketing
efforts and your social media marketing.
Those programs are always on.
Your lead nurturing programs should
also be always-on efforts. Your emailbased lead nurturing program—most
likely deployed using a marketing
automation system—is always on.
Marketers should be taking that extra
step and creating an always-on lead
29 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
6
the
Building Blocks
of a
Nurturing program
30 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
The Building Blocks
of a Nurturing Program
1. Strategy
A solid lead nurturing program begins
with a smart and comprehensive
strategy. The strategy should determine
what good leads look like. What are
the business demographics—job titles,
industry, geo-location, size of the
company—for a good lead? What are
the behaviors of prospects that indicate
they’re a good lead—visiting certain
pages, visiting the website frequently,
sharing their email address?
When defining a good lead, the
marketing department should not
engage in this process alone. At the
very least, marketing should work
closely with sales to agree upon what a
good lead is. The most effective way to
define a good lead is to use the past as
prologue and analyze the characteristics
of people who eventually bought your
product and service in the past, say, 12
months. Getting buy-in from sales is
critical to ensure the success of any lead
nurturing program. “The ideal situation
is definitely to get sales, marketing, and
customer service in the room, because
they all have to work together,” Kuno
Creative’s John McTigue said. “All have
to be aligned, or it’s not going to work
very well.”
“You’re just wasting a whole bunch of
time and money and effort if you’d
don’t get on the same page with
your salespeople,” added Marketing
Interaction’s Ardath Albee. “You
absolutely have to have sales in
that conversation.”
In addition to sales, the marketing team
should also consider collaborating
with IT, finance, and other departments
to make sure that the lead nurturing
program has the technical support and
investment it needs to thrive.
31 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
The Building Blocks
of a Nurturing Program
2. Defining Personas
Virtually every B2B marketer has a sense
of who her target audience is. She
knows the job title of the key buyer and
also knows the job titles of the other
members of the buying team. She also
knows who the key influencers can be—
often the CEO, the CFO, or both.
But knowing the job titles of the target
audience is not enough to build a topflight lead nurturing program. Building
an effective program requires personas,
which demands that B2B marketers
know more about their audience. To
truly personalize a nurturing program
—which is what nurturing is all about
—the B2B marketer has to know the
personality or the persona of each
member of the target audience. Surveys
of customers and prospects, visits
with customers and prospects, and
interviews of your salespeople can
provide the insight necessary to create
these personas and gain a deeper
understanding of your target market.
The marketer should be able to answer
what the professional needs and wants
of the target audience members are.
And once this persona is established,
the B2B marketer can create the relevant
content for every stage of the funnel that
speaks to the target audience—which
is the hallmark of a great lead
nurturing program.
Of her customers, a marketer should be
asking some basic questions about them
and their professional desires, Kuno
Creative’s John McTigue said. Marketers
must answer these questions, he said,
“Who are your customers? What do they
want? What are their frustrations and
pain points.”
32 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
Personas, added Marketing Interaction’s
Ardath Albee, “are critical. I won’t do
a lead nurturing program unless the
company has really great personas.
We need to be able to step into the
mindsets of prospects to figure out how
we’re going to build compelling content.
I don’t know how you create a content
strategy without them.”
Building an effective
program requires personas,
which demands that B2B
marketers know more about
their audience.
The Building Blocks
of a Nurturing Program
3. Segmenting Your Audience
Lead nurturing is different than a
traditional “drip” marketing program.
In a drip campaign, a marketer, over a
predetermined period of time, sends the
same messages to a prospect, no matter
who that prospect is or how they’ve
indicated their intentions by their digital
body language.
With lead nurturing, a marketer sends
a specific message or sequence
of messages to prospects based
specifically on their demographics
and the digital footprints they leave by
their online behavior. In other words, a
sophisticated lead nurturing program
will segment its audience. A CMO,
for instance, will receive a different
sequence of messages than a demand
generation marketer.
Similarly, a prospect who visited the
home page and bounced will receive an
entirely different set of messages than
a prospect who dived deep into the
website and visited several
product pages.
Intelligent segmenting is key to making
a lead nurturing program thrive.
Segmenting an audience allows a
marketer to personalize and customize
messages to prospects. Marketing
automation software is a powerful tool
that allows marketers to create literally
hundreds of segments. In addition to
targeted messaging, this segmentation
enables marketers to reduce investment
in programs that aren’t working – and
double down on programs that are
driving sales.
33 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
The Building Blocks
of a Nurturing Program
4. Create content for your
segments at every stage of
buying process
Because many B2B purchases involve
an extensive buying team—which can
include the ultimate decision maker, a
host of influencers, and the person who
controls the purse strings—marketing
departments must create a variety of
entertaining, helpful and persuasive
content that speaks to the needs of
every part of the buying team. This
content must also speak to the buying
team at every stage of the funnel,
from awareness to consideration to
actual purchase.
Marketers can also create nurturing
content for existing customers. Content
in a program like this might provide a
welcome to new customers. Or it could
nurture upsells or cross-sells in customer
segments who have reached a certain
threshold in spending or have been
a customer for a year or another
important timeframe.
34 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
The Building Blocks
of a Nurturing Program
5. Measure, Test and Optimize
Lead nurturing should be a data-driven
effort. Virtually every aspect of a lead
nurturing program can be measured.
Whether you’re nurturing via email,
telephone or display and social
advertising, the analytics tools exist
to track your performance. With this
technology, marketers can answer:
Which segments are leading most
often to sales? Which emails are driving
engagement? Which display and social
ad sequences are driving prospects
through the funnel?
Marketers with sophisticated lead
nurturing programs use A/B testing
as a matter of course to understand
which messages are resonating with
particular audiences. They examine
which email subject lines are generating
the highest open rates. And even
which content is leading to sales. With
this data, marketers can optimize their
programs to deliver measurable return
on investment.
35 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
The Building Blocks
of a Nurturing Program
6. Maintain a clean,
updated database
Data is good; accurate data is better.
Too many marketers could be more
diligent about maintaining the health
of their databases. A report by Dun
& Bradstreet’s NetProspex found
that 62 percent of companies’ email
deliverability ranks as “questionable” at
best. Additionally, the report, “2015: The
State of Marketing Data,” found that 66
percent of records were missing industry
and revenue data.
Email deliverability is obviously
important: It’s a critical path to
nurturing leads. The lack of industry
and revenue data is also crucial,
because this information is integral
to helping marketers score leads.
62%
66%
of companies’
email
deliverability
ranks as
“questionable.”
of records
were missing
industry and
revenue data.
Without updated and accurate
data, marketers will be hamstrung
in their ability to nurture leads and
deliver the best leads to sales. For
the most effective lead nurturing,
marketers should strive to commit to
improving data hygiene, which can be
accomplished by making it a priority
for customer—and prospect-facing
personnel to develop a habit of asking
their contacts for updated contact
information and other data.
“Data is everything,” said Hootsuite’s
Shantel Shave. “You need to understand
who you’re speaking to in order to have
a conversation that’s relevant to them.
Building that data quality and data
hygiene into your models at the outset is
going to give you such better results.”
36 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
The Building Blocks
of a Nurturing Program
7. Move Your Lead Nurturing
Beyond Email
Email is the foundation of most B2B
marketers’ lead nurturing programs.
Marketers use email in a variety of
forms, ranging from email newsletters
to sophisticated and segmented email
programs that are developed using
marketing automation platforms.
Email is effective as a nurturing tool, but
its drawbacks are well known. For one
thing, it’s impossible to email the 95
percent of website visitors who don’t
share their email address. Additionally,
of the prospects who do share their
email address, about 80 percent of them
don’t open your emails—on a good day!
For this reason, many B2B marketers are
implementing lead nurturing programs
that move beyond email. For instance,
they are using sales development reps
to contact prospects in order to gauge
their sales readiness.
Marketers are also using multi-channel
nurturing programs that reach the
anonymous website visitors who
expressed an interest in their companies.
The main cogs in these multi-channel
nurturing programs are display and
social media advertising.
37 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
95%
of website visitors
who don’t share their
email address.
80%
of them don’t open your
emails—on a good day!
CASE STUDY: CETERA FINANCIAL GROUP
CETERA FINANCIAL MOVES LEAD
NURTURING BEYOND EMAIL
®
Cetera Financial Group provides award-winning wealth management
and advisory platforms, comprehensive broker-dealer and registered
investment adviser services, and innovative technology for more than
9,700 independent financial professionals and more than 500 financial
institutions nationwide.
In its industry of financial services, it is notoriously
difficult to innovate in the marketing side of business.
But Cetera makes great strides to break that stereotype
and employ new marketing technologies to fuel growth.
“We’re always looking for new ways to increase our
exposure with financial professionals, but we didn’t
want to stop there,” explained Eric Hansen, Director of
Recruiting Marketing at Cetera Financial. “We wanted
new and innovative ways to reach more of our target
audience and drive engagement beyond email alone—
to consistently personalize communication with them
after they’d visited our website or given us their
email information.”
38 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
“We wanted new and
innovative ways to reach
more of our target audience
and drive engagement
beyond email alone.”
—Eric Hansen
Director of Recruiting Marketing
Cetera Financial Group
CASE STUDY: CETERA FINANCIAL GROUP
Attracting New Audiences to
the Website at Scale
LinkedIn Network Display enabled
Cetera to reach hundreds of thousands
of finance professionals with display ads
everywhere online. The use of LinkedIn’s
anonymous business demographic data
ensured that ads were only seen by its
most coveted audience—professionals
in finance who worked at “micro” sized
companies (less than 20 employees).
“[The] impact on our visibility in the
marketplace has been substantial,”
Hansen shared. “It has helped give our
prospects a better perspective on who
we are. We have people coming to us
saying ‘I feel like I have to talk to you
guys because I see Cetera
everywhere online.’”
LinkedIn’s Full Funnel Analytics gave
Cetera insight into the impact of its
targeted display advertising efforts with
metrics including net new visitors driven
to its website, engagement levels, clicks,
conversions, and more. In just three
months, LinkedIn drove more than 900
new visitors in finance to the
Cetera website.
39 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
Objectives
• Drive the right audiences
to its website
• Increase visits and engagement
• Drive new business
Target Audience
• Financial professionals
• Financial institutions
Results
• Over 900 new website
visitors driven by LinkedIn
• 27% more pageviews
• Over 13% more visits per visitor
on the website
• Nearly $1 million in
new business
CASE STUDY: CETERA FINANCIAL GROUP
Anonymous Website Visitor
Nurturing Known
Contacts Beyond Email
Cetera uses Oracle Eloqua’s marketing
automation system to nurture it’s
known contacts via email—enabling
segmentation and automation of email
delivery to prospects and customers
for whom Cetera has an email address.
But email has its limitations. And even
for prospects who did open their emails,
Cetera wanted to do more to educate
them about the company. LinkedIn
Lead Accelerator allowed Cetera to
add display and social advertising to
its existing email nurture campaigns,
directly from within the Eloqua
Campaign Canvas. As known contacts
received emails week after week,
synchronized display and social ads
were also delivered to them everywhere
online. Hansen can attest to the positive
impact display and social ads have
had on his nurturing results. “We had
a financial advisor complete a webinar
registration over a year ago, and he
began receiving our emails. One email
sent 4 months ago made him click,
but his subsequent web actions didn’t
trigger any adjustment in his lead score.
About a month after we’d implemented
[LinkedIn Lead Accelerator], he received
a Facebook ad from LinkedIn, clicked,
indicated interest, and later closed.”
Nurturing Anonymous
Website Visitors
Cetera also used LinkedIn Lead
Accelerator to nurture its anonymous
website visitors—those who hadn’t
yet submitted their email address to
Cetera via a form completion. Prospects
who’d previously visited the website
were placed into anonymous nurture
campaigns that delivered waves of
different display and social ads, giving
them a chance to engage with the
most relevant content. As prospects
spent more time on the Cetera website
and indicated specific interests, that
data was used to deliver ads that were
personalized to their unique interests.
LinkedIn’s analytics showed that visitors,
both anonymous and known, who had
been nurtured by LinkedIn viewed
more web pages and visited the site
more often than visitors who hadn’t
been nurtured.
40 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
Deliver Relevant Content
Acquire
CASE STUDY: CETERA FINANCIAL GROUP
It All Comes Down to Driving
New Business
Cetera used LinkedIn to add value
in two critical areas: increasing
brand awareness by driving financial
professionals to the Cetera website
at scale, and seamlessly connecting
display and social advertising to its
marketing automation platform to
not only communicate with known
and anonymous audiences beyond
email, but also to make the buyer’s
journey more personal. And of course,
measuring the impact at each stage
along the path to revenue. Hansen’s
return-on-investment analysis revealed
that LinkedIn has driven more than
$960,000 in new business to Cetera to
date. “The results we’re seeing right
now are a product of adding display
and social advertising into our overall
nurturing strategy—we can reach
prospects anywhere online and make
every interaction with them more
personal and relevant throughout the
buyer’s journey.”
LinkedIn has driven more than
$960,000
in new business to
Cetera to date.
“The results we’re seeing right
now are a product of adding
display and social advertising
into our overall nurturing
strategy—we can reach
prospects anywhere online
and make every interaction
with them more personal
and relevant throughout the
buyer’s journey.”
—Eric Hansen
Director of Recruiting Marketing
Cetera Financial Group
41 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
INTERVIEW: JOHN MCTIGUE
Executive VP, Kuno Creative
Q: What’s the best
metaphor for explaining
lead nurturing?
John McTigue: The best approach is the
advisor-student relationship, where the
salesperson or the person responsible
for the lead nurturing communications
is trusted and viewed as someone who
knows what they’re talking about.
Q: How do you get
marketers to understand
that the buyer’s journey
has changed and, as
a result, lead nurturing
is a necessity?
send all the phone calls to voicemail
and never call them back. This is the
way we all behave now. We’ve become
really good at using those filters, and
it’s not the way we want to be sold to.
We want to do our own research. We’re
going to do our homework first and
figure out what the best solution is for
us, and we’ll contact the salesperson
when we’re ready. As a marketer, you
have to understand that, and you have to
be there when they’re checking you out.
You have to be on all the time, 24/7. You
have to be monitoring everything that’s
going on, and you have to be the best
team in town in terms of content. And
then, if that doesn’t work, I show them
the data, all the statistics, all the surveys
that have been made. Everybody agrees
that sales has really changed, and if you
don’t change you’re going to lose.
McTigue: Two ways. I say, look at the
way you buy. Look at your own situation.
You throw away every email that comes
across your desk. You turn your TiVo on
so you don’t have to watch TV ads. You
42 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
“The ideal situation is definitely to
get sales, marketing, and customer
service in the room, because they
all have to work together. All have
to be aligned, or it’s not going to
work very well.”
—John McTigue
INTERVIEW: JOHN MCTIGUE
Q: What are the first steps
for implementing a lead
nurturing program?
Q: What’s critical to
making a lead nurturing
program work?
McTigue: I ask our customers some
pointed questions like, who are your
customers? What do they want? What
are their frustrations and pain points?
Do you know who they are and how
they shop? What is their criterion for
success, and what are their goals? Do
you know any of that? Usually they don’t,
so you have to start with buyer persona
interviews, and you have to put together
solid profiles of who your customers
are and what they want. Once that’s
done we start mapping out content.
What’s the best content that will appeal
to those buyers at each stage in the
buyer journey?
McTigue: Nowadays, the differentiator
is personalization. The more targeted
the email, the more personalized the
communication is in nurturing, the better.
Our data shows that you get much
higher conversion rates, much higher
email open rates and click-throughs than
you do without personalization. The
way this works is that for each campaign
we run there is a champion, so it might
be me. I at least help write the original
eBook or host the webinars, so I’m
involved in every aspect of it. And then
the nurturing emails are written in my
voice. They’re with my style and focus on
things that I’m interested in and written
in the first person. Those personalized
emails convert much higher than just
kind of your standard email blast.
43 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
“Marketers should be
asking some basic
questions about their
customers and their
professional desires:
Who are your customers?
What do they want? What
are their frustrations and
pain points?”
—John McTigue
7
A great leap
Forward
in lead nurturing
44 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
A Great Leap Forward in Lead Nurturing
For many marketers, the concept of nurturing leads begins and ends with email. With this kind
of lead nurturing, B2B marketers have attempted to stay engaged with prospects who have
shared their email address with e-newsletters and other email communications. Lead
nurturing via email, especially when controlled with marketing automation software,
can be highly effective. But there are downsides to this kind of lead nurturing.
A critical drawback is the simple fact that
only about 5% of a company’s website
visitors ever share their email address.
On top of that, only 20% of prospects
who shared their email address ever
open their email.
The solution is to expand a B2B
marketer’s capability to nurture website
visitors even when they haven’t shared
their email address. With a new product
called LinkedIn Lead Accelerator, B2B
marketers have the capability to identify
the business demographics of website
visitors—the marketers can use data to
discover, for instance, what industry
visitors work in, what their job title
is, and what their company size is. By
combining this data with what content
the prospect viewed on the website, the
marketer can serve targeted display and
social media advertising to prospects,
nurturing them toward becoming a lead
or a customer.
If this sounds like retargeting, it isn’t.
Basic retargeting is a blunt instrument.
It serves the same ads to everyone who
visits a website without accounting
for the website visitor’s demographic
information or their behavior on the
website. Job seekers who visited a
website are served the same ads as a hot
prospect who was visiting the website
to research a company’s products and
services. The targeted display and social
45 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
advertising enabled by LinkedIn Lead
Accelerator is a surgical instrument
that reaches a marketer’s target
audience with a precise, relevant, and
personalized message.
“Lead Accelerator has allowed us
to map our content so that it aligns
with the customer journey and move
people along that path in a very
logical way,” said Hootsuite’s Shantel
Shave. “For us, the conversion rates that
we’ve seen from what we were using
previously—they’re dramatically different,
dramatically improved.”
CONCLUSION
Lead nurturing has changed—dramatically. What once was
the domain of the sales department is now in the hands of
the marketing team. Using marketing automation tools,
marketers have been able to build email nurturing programs
that nurture prospects until they’re qualified leads and ready
to be contacted by sales.
But—by necessity—lead nurturing is
moving beyond the email inbox and
becoming a multichannel process
that involves display and social media
advertising to deliver relevant content
those prospects who haven’t yet shared
an email address. The most effective
marketers are embracing multichannel
nurturing and building always-on lead
nurturing programs that personalize
their communications to deliver the
right message at the right time to the
right person.
46 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
27 Lead Nurturing Experts
to Follow on Social Media
B2B marketing is changing so quickly, and keeping pace with the latest
developments in lead nurturing can be daunting. Using social media to follow
these B2B lead nurturing experts can help make sure you don’t fall behind:
Ardath Albee
Joe Chernov
Ann Handley
Jon Miller
CEO, Marketing Interactions
@ardath421
VP of Marketing, HubSpot
@jchernov
Chief Content Officer,
MarketingProfs
@marketingprofs
Founder, Engagio
@jonmiller
Jay Baer
Paul Dunay
President, Convince & Convert
@jaybaer
Financial Services
Marketing Leader, PwC
@pauldunay
Michael Brenner
Head of Strategy, NewsCred
@brennermichael
Jeff Bullas
CEO, JeffBullas.com
@jeffbullas
Brian Carroll
Executive Director-Revenue
Optimization,
MECLABS Institute
@brianjcarroll
Matt Heinz
President, Heinz Marketing
@heinzmarketing
Margaret Molloy
CMO, Siegel+Gale
@margaretmolloy
Lee Odden
Meagen Eisenberg
Carlos Hidalgo
CMO, MongoDB, Inc.
@meisenberg
CEO, Annuitas
@cahidalgo
CEO, TopRank
Online Marketing
@leeodden
Steve Farnsworth
Doug Kessler
Jeremiah Owyang
CMO, The @Steveology Group
@steveology
Creative Director,
Velocity Partners
@dougkessler
Founder, Crowd Companies
@jowyang
Paul Gillin
Principal,
Paul Gillin Communications
@pgillin
47 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
John McTigue
Co-owner,
Kuno Creative
@jmctigue
Joe Pulizzi
Founder,
Content Marketing Institute
@joepulizzi
27 Lead Nurturing Experts
to Follow on Social Media (cont.)
B2B marketing is changing so quickly, and keeping pace with the latest
developments in lead nurturing can be daunting. Using social media to follow
these B2B lead nurturing experts can help make sure you don’t fall behind:
David Meerman Scott
Ruth Stevens
Keynote Speaker,
Freshspot Marketing
@dmscott
President,
eMarketing Strategy
@ruthpstevens
Alan See
Mike Volpe
CMO, Temps LLC
@alansee
CMO, HubSpot
@mvolpe
Shantel Shave
Director-Demand Generation,
Hootsuite
@mendicity
Brian Solis
Principal Analyst,
Altimeter Group
@briansolis
48 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
Today, LinkedIn members number more than 347+ million
professionals. That’s over one-half of the 600 million
professionals on the planet, representing the largest group
anywhere of influential, affluent and educated people.
For more information, visit
marketing.linkedin.com
49 SOPHISTICATED MARKETER’S CRASH COURSE IN FULL FUNNEL MARKETING